Hand-bound artist’s book, 2025
52 pages
Hard cover (hand bound)
Edition of 1
Size: 24x19cm
Technique: soda ash solution on white 200g Dorée drawing cardboard roll (acid and wood free) which was hand coloured and painted with natural ink from red cabbage
Purpur Index shows my explorations of printing books by means of chemical reactions between red cabbage natural dyes and soda ash solution. I refill an inkjet cartridge of a printer with soda ash solution and print with it on paper that I hand coloured with red cabbage dyes. Where soda ash touches the red cabbage dye, a chemical process starts and colours begin to change. Some colours change immediately, others at different time scales. In time colours will range from green and purple to pink, yellow and ochre. The process is unstoppable, hence the book has a processual character.
The book combines layers of hand-painted and printed images. Some are printed in several layers until the purple colour of the paper disappears completely. Purpur Index also relates to a previous book, Melting Point (2023). I reprinted some of its pages in both negative and positive to see how they age in relation to each other. Purple colours will preserve their colour longer than the greens, which will bleach and turn ochre or yellow much faster. Negatives will thereby become positive in time, as each page of the book goes through changes of their own. My intention is that the book will reach its intended visual form at a point in time, which is yet unknown even to myself and will be only a passing moment when it happens.
